venture investor

www.insidefacebook.com

Here’s the sheet with the breakdown of early investors: Mark Zuckerberg manages to hold onto 28.4 percent of Class B shares, which have 10 times the voting power of Class A shares. Facebook said in its filing today that it plans to sell up to $5 billion worth of...

gigaom.com

As a venture investor and board member, I am relentlessly in pursuit of companies that can set forth aggressive goals, and then exceed them. One of my portfolio company CEOs likes to use the term “consciously competent” — which means being successful by design, rather than by luck. Clearly, this...

techcrunch.com

Editor’s note: Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, a technology-powered real estate broker backed by Madrona Venture Group and Greylock Partners. Follow him on Twitter @glennkelman. At a recent wedding in San Francisco, a friend who runs engineering for a successful, pre-IPO company started talking about a member of the latest...

gigaom.com

If anyone inside most traditional media companies thinks about BuzzFeed at all, they probably see it as the site that posts “viral” photo galleries of kittens and other web ephemera — or possibly as the site that hired reporter Ben Smith away from Politico to head up its more...

gigaom.com

The debate over whether we are in a technology bubble — and if so, what kind of bubble it might be — flared up again over the weekend, sparked by a piece in the New York Times that said venture-capital investors are encouraging startups to forego revenue so they...

techcrunch.com

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil. “In the Studio” opens up February by hosting a former Wall Street derivatives trader turned early-stage venture investor in San Francisco. Renee DiResta, an Associate with O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), is relatively new...

techcrunch.com

A bill introduced today in the Senate by Democrat John Kerry and Republican Richard Lugar proposes a new type of visa for immigrants who create startups and jobs in the U.S. A similar proposal is part of an immigration reform bill in the House. The Startup Visa has been...

techcrunch.com

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington sat down with Benchmark Capital’s Matt Cohler this morning at TechCrunch Disrupt SF to discuss the state of tech investing. One of the first questions Arrington asked was about Cohler’s own startup investments, and specifically whether or not he had invested in any new companies this year. As it turns out,...

techcrunch.com

Countries around the world have never quite been able to recreate the innovative prowess of Northern California’s Silicon Valley. According to Berkeley Professor Anna Sexanian, a tradition of cultural support groups, mainly Chinese and Indian, is one of the Valley’s most unique and lucrative traits. The “brain circulation,” as she...

techcrunch.com

The right investor, the kind who can help startups get over the inevitable “We’re Fucked It’s Over” (WFIO) moments, can turn a startup into a multi-billion dollar company. The fact is that choosing the right investors, whether it be at the seed level or at a Series B or C...

blogs.wsj.com

General Catalyst Partners, a venture investor behind start-ups like Airbnb, is joining the Start Fund and will now back every Y Combinator company sight unseen, VentureWire has learned. Launched last year by Yuri Milner and SV Angel and later joined by Andreessen Horowitz, the Start Fund presents every Y Combinator...

gigaom.com

Every few years, the Cassandras of the investment world get together and write the obituary for venture capital. Just recently, we heard how the amount of cash sloshing around America’s VC community is down again, even if the Instagram sale perked everyone up a little. But there’s at least one...

venturebeat.com

ATP Capital, the firm that manages the BlackBerry Partners Fund, Clairmont Capital, and JLA Ventures, is today re-branding itself as Relay Ventures to sex up its image. (And let’s face it, anything is better than three capital letters.) Relay Ventures is also announcing a new $150 million early-stage mobile...

techcrunch.com

Oh San Francisco, has it really come to this? Are we now at the point where the disheveled men on street corners no longer ask for change, but rather developers? Apparently so. I walked out of the TechCrunch offices yesterday afternoon and passed this guy. He handed me a business...

techcrunch.com

As a fourth generation venture investor, Adam Draper was pretty much predestined to work with startups. The son of Tim Draper, the founder of global VC firm Draper Fisher Jurveston, Adam has made it his mission to do everything in his power to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life...

techcrunch.com

It’s a terribly common situation: after hundreds of hours of thinking through and building a product, a startup finds that its users stumble through a sign-up flow or in finding a feature. That’s in part why usability testing is a no brainer. In fact, there’s a bit of a cottage...

techcrunch.com

Ethical Community, an online, eco-friendly marketplace (which has plans for a snazzier name in the works!), has secured a £200,000 ($316,640 USD) round of seed funding from a syndicate of angel investors, the company is announcing today. Founded in 2009, the marketplace has signed up over 850 sellers from around...

techcrunch.com

Editor’s note: The following excerpt is from Mastering The VC Game, a new book by Jeffrey Bussgang that goes on sale Thursday. It tells the backstory of Twitter from the perspective of founder Jack Dorsey, from his early obsession with couriers and his attempts to create a better dispatch...

techcrunch.com

Tallinn-based tech accelerator Startup Wise Guys – yes, really – has struck a useful deal for the alumni companies that pass through its programme. It’s secured a deal with a venture investor SmartCap, an Estonian based VC, where it will commit €1 million into SWG alumni companies that have a...

techcrunch.com

London-based Ethical Community, which has now rebranded as Eco Market, is an online eco-friendly marketplace – or something of an “Etsy for Eco,” if you will. The company recently launched a completely redesigned platform to accompany its name change, is adding more social features, including a Pinterest-like user interface, and has also taken...

techcrunch.com

Robert J. Moore is the co-founder of RJMetrics, a company whose software helps online businesses make smarter decisions using their own data. He also previously served on the Investment Team of Insight Venture Partners. One of the fun things that happens when you start a company is that you get opportunities...

www.geekwire.com

In the past few years, Bill Gates has already invested in three energy storage companies — MIT spinout Metal Battery, Berkeley-based LightSail Energy and Bellevue-based TerraPower. Now, the Microsoft co-founder is putting his money to a fourth. Pennsylvania-based Battery maker Aquion Energy announced a $35 million funding round today that includes Gates as a new...

www.guardian.co.uk

Plus 'Flash on iPhone soon!', does Android want RIM's… keyboards?, the problems RIM didn't fix, and moreA quick burst of 9 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology teamMobile is where the growth is >> Fred WilsonThere is a significant shift going on this year, much...

eu.techcrunch.com

BaltCap, a leading venture investor in startups in the Baltics region, has signed a €1 million investment in Clusterpoint, an enterprise software startup created by Latvian programmers and backed by seed investors in the UK and Baltics. Clusterpoint has built a database platform designed for cloud computing infrastructure which they...

techcrunch.com

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil. “In the Studio” closes out its inaugural year by welcoming the young CEO of one of the web’s hottest startups who, before his current...

www.businessinsider.com

When Facebook's first lockup expired, insiders rushed for the exits. The company's first investor, Peter Thiel, cashed out. Early venture investor Accel Partners handed over its shares to its own investors. Cofounder Dustin Moskovitz is still unloading pieces of his position. So, yesterday, when Yelp, another post-IPO Web company reached...

venturebeat.com

We’re just over two weeks away from MobileBeat 2012, VentureBeat’s annual mobile conference, and we’ve lined up some of the biggest names in the industry to delve into the event’s core theme: “Design is the new battleground.” We’ve snagged Navin Chaddha, managing director at Mayfield Fund; Michael Spiegelmanm director...

Comments on 'Say hello to the latest MobileBeat 2012 speakers':

pandodaily.com

Though not incredibly well known across the entirety of the venture capital ecosystem, Ribbit Capital founder Meyer “Micky” Malka is making a name for himself within a particular subset: the bitcoin ecosystem. Malka has made several bets on the cryptocurrency since first discovering it in fall 2011 and believes...

www.businessinsider.com

Workday, the enterprise software maker, has wowed investors with an IPO on Friday that really popped. For one savvy venture capitalist, it was a particularly nice payday. Norwest Venture Partners investor George Still tried to get his firm to back Workday. When it turned the company down, Still invested his...

techcrunch.com

Editor’s note: Patricia Nakache is a general partner at Trinity Ventures where she invests in early stage social commerce and entertainment companies. Follow her on Twitter @pnakache. The prevailing wisdom among entrepreneurs these days is that they should initially fund their startups with a $1-2 million convertible note. The logic is that raising...